http://original.antiwar.com/roberts/2010/02/09/us-is-a-police-state/
It Is Now Official: The US Is a Police State
Posted By Paul Craig Roberts On February 9, 2010 @ 11:00 pm In
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Americans have been losing the protection of law for years. In the
21st century the loss of legal protections accelerated with the
Bush administrations war on terror, which continues under the Obama
administration and is essentially a war on the Constitution and
U.S. civil liberties.
The Bush regime was determined to vitiate habeas corpus in order
to hold people indefinitely without bringing charges. The regime
had acquired hundreds of prisoners by paying a bounty for terrorists.
Afghan warlords and thugs responded to the financial incentive by
grabbing unprotected people and selling them to the Americans.
The Bush regime needed to hold the prisoners without charges because
it had no evidence against the people and did not want to admit
that the U.S. government had stupidly paid warlords and thugs to
kidnap innocent people. In addition, the Bush regime needed terrorists
prisoners in order to prove that there was a terrorist threat.
As there was no evidence against the detainees (most have been
released without charges after years of detention and abuse), the
U.S. government needed a way around U.S. and international laws
against torture in order that the government could produce evidence
via self-incrimination. The Bush regime found inhumane and
totalitarian-minded lawyers and put them to work at the U.S.
Department of Justice (sic) to invent arguments that the Bush regime
did not need to obey the law.
The Bush regime created a new classification for its detainees that
it used to justify denying legal protection and due process to the
detainees. As the detainees were not U.S. citizens and were demonized
by the regime as the 760 most dangerous men on earth, there was
little public outcry over the regimes unconstitutional and inhumane
actions.
As our Founding Fathers and a long list of scholars warned, once
civil liberties are breached, they are breached for all. Soon U.S.
citizens were being held indefinitely in violation of their habeas
corpus rights. Dr. Aafia
Siddiqui,<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aafia_Siddiqui> an American
citizen of Pakistani origin, might have been the first.
Dr. Siddiqui, a scientist educated at MIT and Brandeis University,
was seized in Pakistan for no known reason, sent to Afghanistan,
and was held secretly for five years in the U.S. militarys notorious
Bagram prison in Afghanistan.
Her three young children, one an 8-month-old baby, were with her
at the time she was abducted. She has no idea what has become of
her two youngest children. Her oldest child, 7 years old, was also
incarcerated in Bagram and subjected to similar abuse and horrors.
Siddiqui has never been charged with any terrorism-related offense.
A British journalist, hearing her piercing screams as she was being
tortured,disclosed her
presence<http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24605.htm>. An
embarrassed U.S. government responded to the disclosure by sending
Siddiqui to the U.S. for trial on the trumped-up charge that while
a captive, she grabbed a U.S. soldiers rifle and fired two shots
attempting to shoot him. The charge apparently originated as a U.S.
soldiers excuse for shooting Dr. Siddiqui twice in the stomach,
resulting in her near death.
On Feb. 4, Dr. Siddiqui was convicted by a New York jury for attempted
murder.
The only evidence presented against her was the charge itself and
an unsubstantiated claim that she had once taken a pistol-firing
course at an American firing range. No evidence was presented of
her fingerprints on the rifle that this frail and broken 100-pound
woman had allegedly seized from an American soldier. No evidence
was presented that a weapon was fired, no bullets, no shell casings,
no bullet holes. Just an accusation.
Wikipedia has this to say about the
trial<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aafia_Siddiqui>: The trial took
an unusual turn when an FBI official asserted that the fingerprints
taken from the rifle, which was purportedly used by Aafia to shoot
at the U.S. interrogators, did not match hers.
An ignorant and bigoted American jury convicted her for being a
Muslim. This is the kind of justice that always results when the
state hypes fear and demonizes a group.
The people who should have been on trial are the people who abducted
her, disappeared her young children, shipped her across international
borders, violated her civil liberties, tortured her apparently for
the fun of it, raped her, and attempted to murder her with two
gunshots to her stomach. Instead, the victim was put on trial and
convicted.
This is the unmistakable hallmark of a police state. And this victim
is an American citizen.
Anyone can be next. Indeed, on Feb. 3 Dennis Blair, director of
national intelligence told the House Intelligence Committee that
it was now defined
policy<http://news.antiwar.com/2010/02/03/blair-us-govt-can-kill-citizens-ove
rseas-as-part-of-defined-policy/> that the U.S. government can
murder its own citizens on the sole basis of someone in the governments
judgment that an American is a threat. No arrest, no trial, no
conviction, just execution on suspicion of being a threat.
This shows how far the police state has advanced. A presidential
appointee in the Obama administration tells an important committee
of Congress that the executive branch has decided that it can murder
American citizens abroad if it thinks they are a threat.
I can hear readers saying the government might as well kill Americans
abroad as it kills them at home Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Black Panthers.
Yes, the U.S. government has murdered its citizens, but Dennis
Blairs defined policy is a bold new development. The government,
of course, denies that it intended to kill the Branch Davidians,
Randy Weavers wife and child, or the Black Panthers. The government
says that Waco was a terrible tragedy, an unintended result brought
on by the Branch Davidians themselves. The government says that
Ruby Ridge was Randy Weavers fault for not appearing in court on a
day that had been miscommunicated to him. The Black Panthers, the
government says, were dangerous criminals who insisted on a shootout.
In no previous death of a U.S. citizen by the hands of the U.S.
government has the government claimed the right to kill Americans
without arrest, trial, and conviction of a capital crime.
In contrast, Dennis Blair has told the U.S. Congress that the
executive branch has assumed the right to murder Americans who it
deems a threat.
What defines threat? Who will make the decision? What it means is
that the government will murder whomever it chooses.
There is no more complete or compelling evidence of a police state
than the government announcing that it will murder its own citizens
if it views them as a threat.
Ironic, isnt it, that the war on terror to make us safe ends in a
police state with the government declaring the right to murder
American citizens whom it regards as a threat.
Read more by Paul Craig Roberts
* Have Americans Traded Freedom For
Security?<http://original.antiwar.com/roberts/2009/12/25/have-americans-trade
d-freedom-for-security/> December 25th, 2009 * Myths of Our
Time<http://original.antiwar.com/roberts/2009/11/12/myths-of-our-time/>
November 12th, 2009 * America, Israels
Lackey<http://original.antiwar.com/roberts/2009/11/11/america-israels-lackey/>
November 11th, 2009 * The Evil
Empire<http://original.antiwar.com/roberts/2009/11/06/the-evil-empire/>
November 6th, 2009 * The Nobel War
Prize<http://original.antiwar.com/roberts/2009/10/09/the-nobel-war-prize/>
October 9th, 2009
________________________________
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